I see that clicking on the scale will change it somewhat.
But I have no obvious control to change it to the range that I want to see.
I try clicking in different places in various sequences and sometimes I get very detailed expansion but no obvious way to get what I really want to look at.
I would like to see a way to enter the range of interest directly as numbers. And not have to click with the + sign symbol, but rather have a choice.
Also have the left click expand the region at the click point, which is what I thought the documentation said it would do, but on my version with win8.1 it does not.
(It does give some random expansion but not what I expected).
If this is user error then please tell me what I did wrong. thanks.
Click on the left mouse button & drag the “+ sign symbol”***** down the vertical-axis to zoom-in on a particular region …
[ ***** “+ sign symbol” is meant to be a magnifying-glass ]
Could you be searching for Percent Waves versus a dB scale like this (click the graphic if it doesn’t fit)?
This is an artist mock-up so it’s not strictly accurate, and it’s missing the downward numbers. This is a concept illustration.
Most important sound information happens in that top 24dB or so. The lower volume stuff is less important until you get down in the -60dB noise range. Two of the three audiobook specifications and the recommended live recording volume are in that range.
It’s a busy place and it gets squashed if you switch to Waveform (dB).
The initial problem I had was too little gain so the area of interest was low on the screen.
Looking at the top 24-36 would not have shown more than the tips of the signal.
I have found a way to increase the gain without redlines now so the problem is less and
using the tips will let me look at the area of interest to ensure no clipping or other problems.
There is no dB scale with percent waves. That’s an artist representation with the idea of eventually changing Audacity to that instead of a percent scale. Cool Edit does it that way and it would be welcome to have that display and not have to convert with a calculator. Quick, what’s -10dB in percent?
What’s your work? It’s good not go too far down the road without knowing what the poster’s show is. If it is reading for audiobooks, there is a published mastering suite.
If you have a reasonably quiet recording environment, you can apply the three effects and out the door.
-=-
It’s 30 percent. So recommended live voice reading waveform peaks should fall roughly between 30% and 50%. That’s -6dB and -10dB on the meters. Isn’t converting fun? The percent waves are handy here because you should have some. If you record with a flat line, you may never make a quality recording through post production patching and corrections. I’m leery about not getting such a warning in Waveform (dB).
This is not an artist’s representation. That’s an actual screen grab from Cool Edit.
The waves are in percent. They are exactly the same as default Audacity, but the scale is dB, and it relates directly to the sound meter. I don’t remember the rest of the options. I’ve never used them any other way.
70% on the timeline or 0.7 LOG10 times 20 is -3dB. That’s the loudest volume allowed in Audiobook performances. You can probably convert that in your head, right?
